Our Cars
Special Contributor
We have the driver of a once beautiful BMW to thank for owning this Audi. Not that my eldest son, Bradley, had any intentions of replacing his restored 56-plate Land Rover Discovery 3 until this Beemer travelling in the opposite direction decided otherwise, hitting the Land Rover’s offside with such ferocity that only a telegraph pole prevented the off-roader from rolling onto the kerb. It takes a lot to write off a Discovery so it’s no surprise that the once Ultimate Driving Machine was no more – and was collected up in a vacuum bag. Thankfully and miraculously, there were no serious injuries.
In fact, what hurt the most was the insurance pay out that amounted to half of what Bradley had spent on making his Landie desirable and trustworthy – perhaps a sobering lesson about lavishing money on a vehicle that you’ll likely to never recuperate when it, literally, comes to the crunch?
With depleted funds, picking a suitable replacement ‘all-weather’ workhorse was proving pretty difficult and certainly another Discovery was out of the question for what was in the kitty. What we did find however, was an Audi A6 Avant 3.0 TDI Quattro Le Mans – and if it sounds rather grand then that’s because it is. Marketed to celebrate Audi’s dominance of the Le Mans 24 Hours endurance race (winning 13 times from 15 starts), the special edition Le Mans spec added extra kit such as an uprated interior with a special three-spoke S line sports steering wheel and Audi’s Multi-Media Interface (MMI) setup, featuring a 10-speaker audio/CD. Plus, ours came with a television which still works! Mechanically, Le Mans benefitted from the lowered S line suspension and an uprated braking system, which we’ll touch upon later. Only 1000 Le Mans saloons and Avant estates were allocated to the UK so they could well become a future classic.
ND07 DAA is in fairly good nick displaying no real body or interior damage to speak of, having been subjected to a respraying of the flanks and front bumper at some point in the past, although it can still do with a bit of all-round TLC. It’s a seven-owner car with well over 230,000 miles to its credit but crucially, as with our late lamented Discovery, has had a fair bit of money spent on maintenance so it still drives really well. Not a bad buy for £1700 all told considering that when new this A6 retailed at £35,845.
Putting a brake on things
Packing over 220bhp with a mighty 330lbft of torque, the 3.0-litre TDI is still a very quick car – which is why good quality brakes are imperative and what mighty affairs the fronts are, being 357mm in diameter. However, first job to tick off the ‘to do list’ was to cure their shuddering ways. Periodic disc replacement seems to have become a part of modern car maintenance and for parts there’s only one place to go: partsfinder. bil
